Games Workshop’s tabletop war game Necromunda is set in the same post-apocalyptic sci-fi universe as its parent game, Warhammer 40,000, an industrial planet where the richest live above ground hoarding all the wealth and resources. In the depths below Hive City, lower-class gangs battle it out for scraps in the Underhive. Necromunda is smaller in scale than its predecessor, but it’s also differentiated by its unique mashup of tabletop wargaming and D&D-style stats and character-building, giving it more personal stakes and allowing for longer narratives rich in class warfare, religious extremism, and the like.
Absolutely none of this is evident in Necromunda: Hired Gun, a buggy, confusing pastiche of undercooked ideas and mechanics borrowed from better first-person shooters. Players take on the role of a bounty hunter on missions through the wasteland setting, tasked with completing repetitive tasks and acquiring technical upgrades. The game’s formula will be instantly recognizable to anyone remotely familiar with the latter-day FPS landscape, as your bounty hunter has mechanical augmentations like those found in Deus Ex, an arsenal of weapons with different stats à la Borderlands, even a health-replenishing system borrowed from Bloodborne, where quickly dispatching enemies after taking damage will replenish health.
Unfortunately, none of these mechanics improve upon the ways those other games approached the FPS genre, if they work at all. If players find a new gun and want to compare it to their current loadout, they must pick it up, pause the game, and look at the numbers in the menu, rather than just moving the crosshair over the gun like in Borderlands and any number of similar games. Like Doom Eternal, Hired Gun boasts fast traversal but is hindered by controls that feel loose, imprecise, and poorly thought-out: For one, you can boost sideways or backward, but attempting to boost forward causes you to slide along the ground.
Worse, the fast movement and additional abilities end up being mostly unneeded. The game’s enemy AI is suicidally awful, as most enemies charge at the player or get stuck on obstacles until they die. Enemies will also haphazardly spawn into the environment, sometimes inexplicably right before your eyes. In Doom Eternal, teleporting made sense, what with interdimensional demons in the mix, but not so much when you’re only dealing with flesh-and-blood human characters. Similarly incongruent, an instant-kill melee attack is lifted directly from the Glory Kill system from the recent Doom games but lacks any kind of charge-up limitation and makes the protagonist invincible while attacking, meaning the player can simply kill endless numbers of enemies if they get close to them without risk of damage.
Most of Hired Gun’s abilities and weapons pale in comparison to simply melee-killing chains of enemies—most of whom will run up to you in a line, waiting for their turn to be taken down. This is to say nothing of the insane amount of technical problems and bugs that the game currently suffers from, including clipping as you move through the terrain, frequent screen-tearing, and even hard crashes that will leave you sighing at the progress you’ve lost.
At least Hired Gun’s setting is mostly accurate to its source. The Underhive, a large-scale industrial mess of enormous machinery, leaking furnaces, and rusted deathtraps, is impressively rendered—a living, breathing version of the Necromunda graphic novels’ pages. (Fans will recognize Kal Jerico from the expanded fiction as a significant player here.) But even this strong visual representation suffers from an overuse of neon effects, flashing lights, and obtrusive particle systems, to the point where gunfights devolve into incoherent blurs. In short, you may want to take the epilepsy warning at the start of the game seriously.
Throughout Hired Gun, you very much feel its desire to emulate elements of genre-defining hits like the Half-Life and BioShock games, as well as its failure to understand how they utilized their systems and mechanics to engage and immerse players. Worse, Hired Gun turns its back to all that’s promising about Games Workshop’s fiction, such as the various spinoff novels that offer insights into a demented upper-class nobility as well as life in the Underhive, choosing instead to tell a meaningless, mostly incoherent story about archetypal characters who are unmemorable at best. Late in the game, a momentary detour featuring an iconic Warhammer 40,000 monster, one that’s wildly out of place and acting against its bestial nature, serves as a baffling example of how unmoored this game is to its own property.
The game was reviewed using a code provided by Sandbox Strategies.
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